Mubi Monday: Yannick (2023)

Writer-director Quentin Dupieux has been doing great work for some time now, using the medium of film to have lots of fun and probe at the boundaries between audience and artist. Often using some wonderfully surreal premises, he is an acquired taste I have tended to always enjoy.

The starting point for Yannick is a stage play. Our lead character, the titular Yannick (Raphaël Quenard) is unhappy with it. He has travelled to see it, made it the centrepiece of his day off from work, and it is not distracting him from his own issues. We know this when he stands up to inform the three stage actors of this. One thing leads to another, and eventually leads to Yannick holding the actors and audience hostage as they work together to improve the play and give everyone a much better experience.

Clocking in at just over an hour in length (67 minutes is the full runtime, which includes credits), Yannick is a smart and intelligent look at the relationship between, yes, the audience and the artist. Dupieux is looking at a different facet of that relationship though, and I couldn’t help but view this as an exploration of the many recent incidents we have seen where fandoms turn toxic. Being a fan of something, or even just wanting to be a fan of something that doesn’t live up to your expectations and/or standards, doesn’t entitle you to attempt any kind of hostile takeover. Feedback and collaboration are both important, but it should all be for the right reasons, and at the right time. That might just be me though, and it is a stance not necessarily supported by the third act of this film, which may show Dupieux simply underlining how creators shouldn’t be averse to contributions from those with different viewpoints.

Wherever he lands on the issue, Dupieux does a great job of presenting a scenario that gives viewers plenty to chew on. Feeling very much like a play itself, the film benefits from the short runtime, being so densely packed with great dialogue and ideas, as much as it benefits from the casting.

While Pio Marmaï, Blanche Gardin, and Sébastien Chassagne are all very good in their roles, the actors in the play who are frustrated, angered, and scared at various times throughout the process of reworking their material, Quenard does a fantastic job of making his character feel unpredictable, and potentially dangerous, without ever seeming despicable. I recently enjoyed Quenard’s performance in Junkyard Dog, but this very different role has shown me that he is someone I definitely want to see as a lead in more movies.

Typically playful and thought-provoking, Yannick is another excellent work from Dupieux that will easily please fans of his style. It might even work well as a starting point for those who have yet to explore his filmography (the dialogue and dynamic crystallizing his main themes in a way that is more digestible than it is in some of his other films). Highly recommended, but mainly to people who will already have at least some inkling of what Dupieux likes to do.

8/10

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Mubi Monday: Happening (2021)

Based on a 2000 novel by Annie Ernaux, and set in 1960s France, this is a film that takes viewers back to a time when women found themselves struggling to access the option of abortion after falling pregnant during the wrong time of their life. Good job that is an old-fashioned and harmful scenario that has been consigned to the dustbin of history, eh. 

I am, of course, being a bit facetious. I decided to watch this film now because of the recent events that have unfolded int he USA, but that country isn’t the only one that seems determined to stop women from having a choice in what happens to their own bodies. There are many other countries that make it difficult, including some that are hypocritically criticising the USA right now.

Anyway, let’s get to the film itself. Anamaria Vartolomei plays Anne, a young woman who finds out that she’s pregnant. That isn’t what she wants, because it could affect her studies, and subsequently affect the rest of her life. But finding anyone to help her proves to be very difficult, especially with the legal penalties that could punish any medical professional for even hinting at abortion as an option.

Directed by Audrey Diwan, who also helped adapt the source material with a few others (including Marcia Romano as her main co-writer), this is a drama with a strong point to make, and it features at least two scenes that will make many viewers wince, especially female viewers. While those scenes feel shocking, they also feel sad and disturbing because of the circumstances surrounding them. Nothing is here JUST for shock value. It’s all showing the desperation and difficulty of a pained young woman seeing people around her close off options that will allow her to reclaim her life as her own.

There are many other people involved in this cast, and all do a good job, but the focus remains firmly on Anne, which rests the entire movie on the young shoulders of Vartolomei. So it’s a good job that Vartolomei is so great as the lead character, being presented as an absolutely normal and “non-special” woman who tries to keep herself balanced while her world whirls and tilts around her. She is, deliberately or not (and I think it is deliberate), almost a blank page for others to project things on to, someone who is defined by one moment that creates a chain reaction that may be impossible to stop. She is one woman, she is all women, although I am very well aware that there are many others who would have an even tougher time if pregnant and aiming to regain bodily autonomy and control over their own destiny. But there are still enough moments of massively depressing familiarity here for anyone who has ever felt their world shrinking around them as they stretched out to find life-saving assistance from anyone nearby.

Maybe more of a lesson than a full movie experience, Happening is no less worthwhile because of how it is presented. In fact, it’s arguably more worthwhile, it’s a film that has standard moments of drama to simply string everything along in between the moments that it’s really designed to showcase.

I’m not sure if this will work for anyone who has a very strong “pro-life” stance, but you should try to get them to watch it anyway. Because we need to keep trying to convince people to care about human lives post-birth as much as they care about fetuses that they somehow imagine wearing little hats and booties.

8/10

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